Sunday 29 November 2009 19.05 EST
First published on Sunday 29 November 2009 19.05 EST

There aren't many films about the Japanese art of corpse beautification. Still fewer made by a director who previously specialised in soft-core porn and starring an ex-boy band heart-throb. But Departures (Okuribito), which opens in Britain on Friday, is all these things. It won this year's best foreign language Oscar, beating two critically feted films, Waltz with Bashir and The Class.

But why? The film, after all, is hardly a Saturday night no-brainer. Loosely adapted from Aoki Simmons's autobiography Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician, it's about a redundant cellist who finds meaning in his life when he gets a job ceremonially washing bodies, preparing them for entry into the next life. Even in Japan, where films about death and funerals are not uncommon (see Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Ikiru), the role of the encoffineer is taboo – something the film confronts. When the hero Daigo (played by Masahiro Motoki) sees an ad for somebody to work in "departures" he thinks he is applying to become a travel agent. But he overcomes his revulsion at the idea of working with corpses to find fulfilment.

Director Yôjirô Takita says he never imagined that his film would be a commercial success like his previous porn films, still less one that would win awards in the west. "People may look away, thinking that dealing with this theme is not necessarily commercial. However, maybe because it is unusual and people do look away, it makes us creators even more curious and want to open the doors to that world."

Yet Departures has struck a chord worldwide. "The idea actually came from Motoki himself," says Takita. "Through his travels in India, he had grown a very strong consciousness about life and death. The idea of the encoffineer was somewhat an unusual ritual, even for Japanese, but we were all fascinated about this occupation which acted as a bridge between the deceased and the living."

Television has had Six Feet Under, but never since the adaptation of Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar, about a Walter Mitty-like undertaker's clerk, has a film spent so much time in funeral parlours. While Billy Liar dreams of becoming a comedy writer, however, Daigo Kobayashi finds fulfilment in what seemed a dead-end job.